Eleven
Matt inserted the key Shelly had given him into the door marked MICROBIOLOGY LAB and pushed it open. He and Sam entered and turned the lights on.
“Wow!” Matt said, glancing around the large equipment-filled room.
Sam smiled and began reading the labels. “Hey, Matt, here’s an old electron microscope,” she said, grinning. “I haven’t seen one of these since my med school days.”
Matt was astounded at the wealth of equipment Shelly had put at their disposal, but after watching TJ at dinner the other night, he was convinced Shooter was right to be worried. Her behavior, though not outrageous, was certainly not normal for her. She was entirely too hungry for bloody, half-cooked meat to suit Matt’s mind; moreover, she seemed listless and distracted lately, not at all the bubbly TJ he used to know.
As his thoughts ranged back to that night, Sam walked up to him and snapped her fingers. “Hey, are you with me?” she asked, smiling at his dreamy, disconnected expression.
“Huh? Oh, yeah, sure,” he said, snapping out of it. “I was just thinking. Do you think TJ will really let us run the tests on her when it gets right down to it?”
“That’s what I was about to tell you,” Sam answered. “I don’t believe we’re gonna have any problems with her. She woke me up last night, dripping with sweat and with a terrified expression on her face.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah. Seems she’s been having these dreams, almost every night, and they’ve really got her spooked.”
“What sort of dreams?”
Sam bit her lip. “I’m not supposed to tell anyone, but they concern her acting in an . . . unusual manner.”
Matt stared at her, trying to read between the lines of what Sam wasn’t telling him. After a moment, he thought he had it. “You mean, she’s been dreaming of sucking the blood out of people?”
Sam gave a slight nod, uncomfortable even talking with Matt about what TJ had told her in confidence. “That’s pretty close. In any event, the dreams have made TJ want to be checked out. She’s as afraid of becoming like Niemann as we are for her.”
“When did you tell her we’d start?” Matt asked.
“After she gets off duty today. Her shift ends at five.”
Matt glanced at his watch. “I’ve got a one o’clock class to teach; then I’ll go down to the lab and get what we need to draw blood and bring it up here.”
Sam glanced around at the counters and tables covered with equipment. “Good. I’ll spend my time trying to figure out how to use this stuff. Hopefully, there’ll be some manuals scattered around somewhere.”
Matt grinned. “If you get stuck, call Shelly. Some of these machines look as old as he is.”
Sam frowned, taking Matt’s joke seriously. “You know, that’s not a bad idea. After all, Shelly’s probably forgotten more about lab tests and microbiology than either of us know.”
“Do you think TJ would mind?”
Sam shook her head. “No. TJ loves Shelly. I’m sure it’d be all right with her, especially since Shelly was in on all this from the beginning.”
Matt leaned over and gave Sam a quick kiss. “OK, babe, I’ve gotta go.”
She grabbed him by the front of his white clinic jacket. “No, you don’t mister!” she growled, her voice husky. “I want a better good-bye kiss than that.”
“You modern women are so demanding,” Matt said, shaking his head. He stepped closer, put his arms around her, and kissed her as she wished to be kissed.
When they broke, Matt’s face was flushed. “Maybe I could get someone else to give that lecture, and we could . . .”
Sam shook her head. “No, we’ve got too much to do, big boy. But,” she added with a mischievous smile, “that’ll give you something to look forward to tonight.”
“Promise?”
“Yes. Now go teach the med students something useful and then we’ll meet back here to get ready for TJ this afternoon.”
* * *
TJ was terrified at the changes she felt taking place in her body lately. Her dreams were filled with visions of blood-drenched necks and bodies torn asunder; her days were spent with a deep hunger gnawing at her insides, a void that could only be satisfied by meat cooked so rare the blood dripped and pooled on the plate around it. The image of Roger Niemann and his black, piercing eyes consumed her mind from the time she awoke until she drifted into fitful, restless sleep. At times, her loins ached with remembrance of the passion they’d shared in his lair when she was his prisoner. She still couldn’t understand how she’d responded to his lovemaking when she despised him and everything he stood for, but she couldn’t erase her memories of their wild coupling.
The only thing that scared her more than these recent changes was the thought of undergoing more laboratory tests with Matt and Sam. It wasn’t the tests that frightened her, but rather the chance that the tests would determine there was no hope; she feared she would end up like Roger, skulking about in the darkness, looking for hapless victims to assuage her hunger for blood.
She took a deep breath, smoothed her hair, and opened the door to the microbiology lab. Sam and Matt glanced up from a computer on a gray metal desk in the corner of the room.
“Hey, TJ,” Sam called cheerfully, as if they were two girlfriends meeting for a casual lunch, instead of a doctor and her patient about to undergo tests that would determine her fate.
“Hi, TJ,” Matt said, barely taking his eyes off the computer screen.
“Hi, guys,” TJ replied, trying to sound more hopeful than she felt.
“Come on in,” Sam said, beckoning to her. “We’ve just gotten an e-mail from the doctor in Canada that Shelly referred us to. He’s the world’s leading authority on plasmids.”
“Canada?” TJ asked, walking over to read behind Matt’s shoulder.
“Yeah,” Matt answered, wondering if she’d forgotten their conversation at the restaurant the other night. “His name is Professor Bartholomew Wingate, M.D., Ph.D., and no telling what else. He teaches micro at McGill University Medical School in Montreal.”
“What’s he say?” TJ asked, trying to keep the fear out of her voice.
Matt shrugged. “He’s asking me to fax him all your previous lab results as well as whatever other information we might have on the origin of your infection.”
Sam put her hand on TJ’s shoulder; her sympathetic smile showed she understood what TJ was going through. “We’re gonna send him some copies of the journal pages in Niemann’s book in which he tells how the whole thing started, as well as some of the symptoms he describes.”
“What else does he say?” TJ asked.
“He attached some of his research papers to the e-mail,” Matt said, clicking on the icon of the paper clip in the upper right part of the screen. “I already had most of them from the Internet, but he included some that haven’t been published yet. Mainly, they deal with different kinds of plasmids that are used to stop conjugation among other plasmids.”
TJ nodded slowly, smiling as she remembered how Shooter had misunderstood the term conjugation, thinking it had some sort of sexual meaning. “Yeah, that’s a good idea. Plasmids reproduce by conjugation; so if we can stop that, all the plasmids left will die of old age eventually, just like blood cells do, and I’ll be cured.”
“The only problem is, the anticonjugation plasmids are very specific. Wingate says he’ll need to know quite a bit about your particular plasmids before he can grow some anticonjugation ones to combat them.”
TJ’s forehead wrinkled. “But didn’t the tests you took earlier, when I was really sick, give us that information?”
Sam shook her head. “I’m afraid not, TJ. About all we could find out was the infection had something to do with plasmids. Our equipment wasn’t delicate enough to determine the specific type of plasmids involved.”
“What about Niemann’s journal?” she asked, looking from one to the other. “Didn’t he say he’d been doing just this kind of research for many years? Maybe he’s got the answers we need.”
Matt glanced at Sam, a troubled look on his face. “No doubt he did, TJ, but he didn’t put his research results in his journal.”
TJ snapped her fingers. “I know. They’re probably in the warehouse he used as a safe house. We could look there.”
Matt grimaced. “Yeah, we could. Except, Damon told me that someone took all the stuff outta Niemann’s warehouse a couple of days after he was killed. It was picked clean.”
Sam stared at Matt. “You didn’t tell me that,” she said. “Who would do such a thing?”
Before Matt could reply, TJ’s face paled and she stumbled to a seat in front of the desk. “Roger,” she said, her voice croaking on the word.
“TJ, Roger is dead,” Matt said gently.
Her tortured eyes turned to him. “Did the police ever find his body?” she asked.
“Well, no . . . ,” Matt began.
TJ buried her face in her hands. “I knew it!” she moaned.
“TJ, don’t go jumping to conclusions,” Sam said.
She looked up, a haunted look in her eyes. “He’ll come for me. He told me we’d be together forever.” She closed her eyes tight, trying to shut out the memory of his naked body pushing against hers, and of her frantic response to the feelings it stirred in her.
Sam turned to Matt, tears in her eyes at the pain her friend was going through.
Matt came around the desk and laid his hand on TJ’s shoulder. “If he does, TJ, Shooter and the police will get him again, just like they did before.”
Sam knelt in front of TJ to get her attention. “TJ, Roger is dead. There have been no further killings in Houston since the police shot him. If Roger were still alive, we’d know it by the bodies he’d leave behind.”
For the first time, a hopeful gleam appeared in TJ’s eyes. “That’s right. If he were still alive, he’d be feeding and we’d read about it in the newspapers.”
Sam stood up. “Sure, so quit worrying about it. What we’ve got to do now is draw some of your blood and send it to Dr. Wingate so he can start classifying your plasmids.”
“Did he say how long that would take?” TJ asked.
“Unfortunately, several months at least,” Matt said. “It would be much quicker if we could somehow find the results of Niemann’s research.”
TJ grabbed Matt’s arm. “We could go look in the warehouse. Maybe the police missed something or the robbers left something behind.”
Matt glanced at Sam, and then he shrugged. “I guess so. I don’t see what harm it could cause.”
“First,” Sam said firmly, “we’re going to draw some of your blood and get it sent on the way to Wingate. Then we can go to the warehouse.”
“All right,” TJ said, her mood upbeat at the thought of going to look for Niemann’s research papers. She felt sure if they could just find them, they would show a way out of her present predicament.
She brushed aside a momentary dread at entering the place where Niemann had so debased her. She took a deep breath and squared her shoulders. She knew in order to survive the ordeal facing her, she was going to have to be stronger than she had ever been before. But it would be worth it if she could somehow be cured of the curse Niemann had put on her.
TJ sat in a chair and stuck out her arm, grimacing as Matt approached her with a needle and syringe in his hand.